Half Life
by xTitania
Summary: A music video for the song Half Life by 10 Years. Involves vampires. A short little skit, really.


**Half Life**

**By 10 years**

Styling your shroud  
Infecting the crowd  
Steady letting the fruit of her thrill  
Fool you so well

Vampire. A man vampire stands over an open coffin in a cemetery. A faceless crowd shuffles behind him, whispering. He stands above her, water dripping from his nose, expressionless. Camera moves into what he's looking at. A woman, white as marble, dressed in black. She is beautiful with raven hair and delicate features. She is dead.

Fictitious styles of living  
We've expected to work  
But this is all your giving  
Half of what your worth  
Pigeon hold in battles  
Overtones of snow in her clutch  
Falling through lines  
One more breath destroys the best of you  
The death of you

Camera spans the crowd. Faces of humans, their emotions deplayed across their faces, hair slick to their scalps, their eyes wide with confusion at the undercurrent of emotions they cannot understand. They are trembling, they are weak. Quick, a vampire face among the masses. Another. Another. They are there. Expressionless, cold. Regretful? Maybe. They are there because they are - there is no reason. The humans are afraid. They are afraid of death.

Styling your shroud  
Infecting the crowd  
Steady letting the fruit of her thrill  
Fool you so well

The camera returns to the man, turning from the crowd in a somewhat circular movement, returning to his emotionless face. He moves. Cold fingers reach to grasp hers, stopping millimeters from her cold, wet skin. Instead, his fingertips brush over the ivory marble of her skin. His face tightens imperceptibly, his jaw clenching. Sorrow? Suddenly…

A precious gift embedded deep within your skin  
But parasitic pleasures are closer than kin  
Please expose your shadows  
Such concerns are products of love  
Falling in lies  
One more fraud destroys our trust in you  
Our love for you

He is haphazardly atop a woman, the bottom half of his body off the bed. She lays upon the bed, her chest beneath his. All you can see of him is the back of his head. He is clothed in black, layers of a black suit which could be from either the 1800s or the present day for all that we can see. His neck criss-crosses over hers. His head, his mouth, is atop the side of her neck. The woman's face, visable below his neck, is heavy-lidded and unfocused, her face alight with sensual pleasure. He is grasping her shoulders. His white, long fingers tighten, and she moans soundlessly. In pain? In pleasure? They are alight by firelight from a fire out of the camera's view. What of her you can see (legs, her face, the hip and side) is coverd in sheer apricot fabric which is layered to opaqueness. Her hair is an auburn-chestnut mass splayed across the pillow, a knot of curls and spidery strands. The light flickers harshly at her, alternating her face between forgiving shadow and ugly garishness. She is human. She is paltry, she is prey. She gasps soundlessly below him.

Styling your shroud  
Infecting the crowd  
Steady letting the fruit of her thrill  
Fool you so well

The man is no longer touching the dead vampiress's hand, but still he stares at her face. His face is no longer expressionless. His lips tighten with pain, his face crumbles. Suddenly, he is expressionless again. The fraction of a moment of pain, of loss, of unguarded sorrow is gone. Again he stares at her face. But we have seen his pain. The camera pulls away, and for a moment we are lost in shadows, somewhere between the graveyard and the room, dark and cold and alternating between the liquid heat of the fireplace in that room so far away.

As you kiss the abstract  
And pray it's everything you'd hoped for  
The smell of her, the thrill of her  
The fruit of her, the use of her  
Is killing everything that you've worked for

The woman is trembling. She blinks. She starts to writhe – not struggling against the vampore, but not quite mesmerized by him any longer. His fingers arch against her shoulders and begin a sensual massage – a venting of his passion, passion that had nothing to do with flesh – nothing to do with this shivering mass of fleshy fear and bumbling naivete, for he seems to have forgotten the human carcass below him. The woman jerks her head from side to side, yet does not try to force the vampire off her. Her face seems to be struggling out of a deep slumber. For a moment, intelligence flickers within her eyes… it is quickly gone, swallowed in a mind numbing wash of terror and power. Her struggles slow.

The smell of her, the thrill of her  
The fruit of her, the use of her  
Is killing everything that you've worked for

The vampires in the crowd turn and look at each other, one by one, little syncronized movements. A silent communication of a mutual emotion and thought. This silly human ritual of grief had been played out. Their eyes are hollow without feeling. They look as humans do… if humans did not feel. If humans had no color in them. No life. They are all beautiful in a way that is not. They are elegant, handsome, but not beautiful in the human way – if they were human, they would not have been. They are beautiful because they are vampire. The camera flickers between the crowd and their vampire guests and the man, back and forth, faster, and then suddenly, only bewteen the man and that room with that womanso fast. The man closes his eyes abruptly.

The smell of her, the thrill of her  
The fruit of her, the use of her  
Is killing everything that you've worked for

Suddenly the womans face twists in fear, and with inhuman strength thrusts the man off her. Everything is so slow. Her neck is a bloody ragged line, ripped from where she tore his fange from her. The man is sprawled on the floor, his lips parted. His tongue snakes out and licks her blood off. His expression is inhuman, unremorseful. She is merely prey. The woman stands motionless, caught in the predator's gaze. She is in shadow again, the firelight flickering against her covered skin, a curl of her hair, an eyelash. Fear. She trembles. He merely gazes at her.

Styling your shroud  
Infecting the crowd  
Steady letting the fruit of her thrill  
Fool you so well

He opens his eyes, and his lips part as he stares at the corpse of his beloved. He closes his eyes again, but then immediately opens them, defying th feeling. His eyes are pits of despair. His pain radiates. The crowd shuffles uncertainly behind him, but he ignores them, locked within the shell of his pain. His rage of emotions clashes with the dead woman's gaping hole of nothingness, of death. And then it is gone, his pain, dissapperaing once again beneath his mask. The transference from the cemetary to the room is abrupt, now.

Smell of her  
Thrill of her  
Fruit of her  
Use of her

Smell of her  
Thrill of her  
Fruit of her  
Use of her

Smell of her  
Thrill of her  
Fruit of her  
Use of her

The smell of her  
Thrill of her  
Fruit of her  
Lucifer

He pants, staring at her. Then, he stands in a fluid motion, never breakign his gaze. She is caught, trapped by him. She trambles, her face twisting in fear, in hate now. She would rather die than he touch her now. He walks to her now. She is immobile, her head turning up to continue the contact of his eyes. She is not mindlessly mesmerized. She fears. She knows that he will kill her. She trembles. She would weep but for that she is to angry to. He doesn't care. He will have her, he will take her blood and he will kill her. He will vent his pain at her. His inconsolable pain, and if he dies, so be it. If he dies, he will be with his beloved. His hands comes up and grasps the side of her face. It seems gentle, until he wrenches her face to the side, exposing the damaged neck to his fangs. Her face is a mask of terror, ugly hatred. Abomniation. He bends his head to take. He is expressionless, we can tell by the flash of his face before it is obscured by his blood-smeared, cherry red mouth. His lips part to reveal delicate fangs, but enough to rip, to impale her delicate, human flesh. His teeth arc as if he bites from an apple, disappearing beneath his somehow crimson lips, now touching her discolored skin in avampire kiss, made somehow white by a trick of the firelight. It trembles as she trembles. Suddenly he is ripped away, before he can even sink in his fangs, his lips torn from her flesh. We span to look at her, from his view. She is holding a fire poker, it's tip reddened with blood. Her lips are pulled back in a grimance, a growl of hatred, amar upon her face. We look at him, as her view. His white shirt is rapidly succumbing to a red sea, torn from a gaping wound in cloth and flesh. His face is passionless, staring at her, as if feels not the wound. He is not angry. His eyes close, fight to open. And then he lays still. Again we turn look at her, the bloody poker glinting in the firelight. For the first time, she stands fully in the firelight, shadows falling from her figure, encompassing only the nether side of her being, away from the firelight. Her face is expressionless, her skin as marble. As she was garish and fleshily human before, she is somehow beautiful and elegant now. Her skin is white as powdered alabaster, contrasting the apricot of the flimsy gown now as it had blended into it before. She is a vision of untouchable beauty, opposite to the paltry human prey she had been mere seconds before. Her hair is a cascade of curls, sleek, the illusion of tangled uncleanliness gone. Her face is as passionless as his. She mouths "Lucifer" (in harmony with the song).

At the cemetary, the man is again staring at the woman's face. There is now naked sorrow on his face. The crowd is dispersing, the vampires hidden within turning and walking away without a glance back. They were there, and now they have left. It is simple, emotionless to them. The man stands still beside her. His face holds sorrow, a foreign emotion on his face. Pain rages upon his face, submerging within his vampiric façade to war once again upon the planes of his face. The camera spans around them, pulling away, leaving him by her side, as he shall always be, every part of him but the shell that is his body. Slowly, the sounds of the graveyard, the slow swish of the grass, the patter of the raindrops intrude for less than a second, then everything fades to black.


End file.
